Wipe Out

I remember, I remember, the place where I was born.  I remember it in great detail, some of it in large blanket chunks, some in a rag bag of disconnected jigsaw pieces, but the memories are a part of me. I remember my old route to school, the post-war houses set round tatty greens and the multi-storey flats that were being built as I walked by.  I remember the Rough, a wilderness of nettles and hawthorn and sinister culverts, where we made dens, and the playing fields and the swings, and the copse under the railway arch where you could find wood anemones and wild strawberries.  I remember the walk to my aunt and uncle’s house, a mile away, past the parade of shops with the hardware store that stocked everything from fork handles to four candles, and the off-licence that sold Double Diamond and, to the very sophisticated, an occasional bottle of Hirondelle. I remember the billowing folds of aubrietia on the low walls in their garden, the china on display in their cabinet, the books on their shelves.  Somewhere in my memory is every crack in the pavement, every pane of glass, every tree root, every corner where the shadows fell.

Now I’ve been back to the place I left nearly 30 years ago.  It’s not the first time I’ve been back. The usual reason: a funeral.  It has always felt odd, going back, finding that a place has continued to exist without me, but I have never before felt so uncomfortable about the way the world that once fitted round me like a glove has been overlain by a layer of life that has nothing to do with me.  The old glove is still there, that’s the trouble.  Its seams are splitting and the lining’s ripped, but it is still recognisable as my old glove, under the entirely different mitten that has been plonked on top of it.  The multi-storey flats still stand, looking as if they wished they were scheduled for demolition, and maybe they are.  The culverts in what was the Rough are still there, lurking behind the brand new community centre that has replaced the hawthorn bushes.  The copse is still perched on the stream bank, marooned now beyond a brand new link road and roundabout.  The parade of shops still stands, but now they’re Indian restaurants and betting shops, and I have no idea where anyone goes to buy fork handles.  At my uncle’s house, the low walls still stand in the garden, but without the aubrietia.  There’s different china in the cabinet, and different books on the shelf, but the same table that I remember from 50 years ago.  Part of me wants to go nosing in and unearth as much as possible of the old, just as I remember it, but I think, on the whole, I would prefer, from now on, to return and find it all swept away, bulldozed into oblivion, demolished, remodelled and rebuilt, by the people who claim it now.  Then my former world can safely travel with me, as pure memory that no one else can trespass on and mess with.  What this means is that I am getting seriously old.  Bugger.

UKEUGB

So, if Cameron wins the next election, we shall have a referendum to establish whether we stay in Europe or flounce off on our own.  The new terms that Cameron wants to negotiate will probably keep a free market open for businesses and bankers, but will opt us out of the sort of EU rules that protect us common working plebs, but I don’t suppose we’ll have a chance to vote on whether we want the old or new terms.

But a referendum about staying in the EU might turn out to be pointless anyway, because we shall already have had the referendum on Scotland’s independence by then.  The president of the European Commission suggests  that if Scotland votes to go it alone, it will not automatically be a member of the EU, but will have to apply for membership as a brand new country.  If that does happen, surely the same will apply to whatever is left of the former U.K, because England isn’t a member of the EU in its own right either.  Nor is Wales.  Northern Ireland is a possible, perhaps, because the country that is a member of the EU is “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,’ so at least it gets a mention.  But Great Britain came into existence when the two former kingdoms of Scotland and England (which included Wales) were united in 1706.  If Scotland drops out, Great Britain will no longer exist, so neither will the U.K.  What we’ll be needing will be a referendum to decide whether we should apply to be allowed in to the EU.  And the EU might say no.  In fact, if I were them, I would.

Bang Bang

A woman likes guns.  She likes shooting them and she believes she’s going to need them to keep the world at bay, so she collects them, because she has a constitutional right to own them.  Her son takes them, kills her, several teachers and 20 primary school children.  If a boy is disturbed, inclined to suicide or violent outbursts, even if only for a brief drunken or confused moment in an otherwise sane and balanced life, the ready availability of guns makes a very nasty outcome depressingly inevitable.  The gun lobby in the USA responded to the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, by suggesting that the obvious solution is to have armed guards in schools.  Of course, the solution is more guns.

After the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, the British response was to make the private ownership of handguns illegal.  I like to think that the Firearms (Amendment) Acts of 1997 were not so much a piece of criminal legislation as a constitutional statement: We, the People, abjure any right to carry instruments that are designed purely for the purpose of harming other human beings.  It is impossible, as a Brit, to make any sense at all of people who believe that the constitutional right to own, carry, and shoot firearms provides a vital bulwark against the threat of tyranny.  Most sane people understand that the best bulwark against tyranny is the ballot, not the bullet.  Most sane people see that the stockpiling of guns by weirdo militias is an invitation to tyranny, not a bulwark against it.  Most sane people see that one person’s right to carry guns destroys everyone else’s right not to have to. Listening to the gun lobby’s response to the Newtown massacre, and hearing of the impossibility of anti-gun legislation in the USA, I begin to wonder if we occupy the same planet. 

And then a couple of unarmed members of staff in a school in California bravely talk a disturbed gunman out of carrying out another massacre and I think maybe there is hope for the sanity of the human race.

The true meaning of Christmas

It’s the 24^th December.  Sunrise, here at 52° North, was at 8.05 and sunset will be at 15.55.  Sorry, Christians, but that’s what Christmas is about.  It might be different in South Africa or Australia, or even in California and Florida, but here in Britain, this is very obviously the sad and sorry time of the year.  More than two thirds of the day are in darkness, with the sun abysmally low at noon and a good chance of lowering clouds and pouring rain to cut down the light even further. What do we have to look forward to in the coming weeks, but ice, snow, chill, rheumatism, transport snarl-ups and misery.  So it goes without saying that Christmas, conveniently parked next to the Winter solstice, is the one ‘Christian’ festival that a secular society has clung to, for reasons that have nothing to do with official religion.

Just as we have clung to the need for bonfires and fireworks to mark the onset of the dark, without really giving a toss about 17^th century terrorists trying to blow up Parliament, so we stick to an instinctive need to celebrate wildly and illogically in the very heart of darkness.  We want singing and noise, we want feasting and drunkenness, to cheer us up and, most of all, we want reassurance that this isn’t the onset of the end but a turning point, that from here on, the days are going to start getting just that little bit longer.  We want light: candles, and fairy lights on the Christmas tree if we no longer have the yule log blazing. We want families, to reassure us that we belong somewhere, even if we finish up snarling at each other.

Most of all, we want tradition.  We want ritual, the same thing, year after year, the same ritual food, even the sprouts that nobody likes and pudding that everyone is too stuffed to tackle.  We want the same songs, the choir boy singing Once in Royal, the same Slade and Bing.  We want to watch infants perform the same nativity plays really badly, and the same… well, things haven’t quite been the same since the loss of Morecombe and Wise, but there’s always the Midsomer Murders Christmas special.  It has to be the same, because then we know that it’s all one big cycle.  It comes around and it goes around. The light will come back, the days will be once again be long and warm and sunny.  Never mind that warm sunny days are as much a myth as snowy Christmases, it’s the thought that counts.  The carefully nurtured illusion.

We need Christmas when it is, how it is, because we’ve still got to get through January.  The mysterious birth of a baby fits beautifully with our need for the notion of new beginnings,  just as the vulgarity, the frantic shopping and the absurdly extravagant spending on unwanted gifts and pointless frills, fit with the lord of misrule in us all that is itching to come out and defy this full stop of the year.  We need to turn everything upside down, like we did last year and we will insist on doing next year.  I suppose even the inevitable sermons decrying our irreligious consumerism and imploring us to remember ‘the real meaning of Christmas’ is a part of the ritual we couldn’t possibly do without. Bring it on.

This Kate stuff

I am not a monarchist.  I have no personal feelings for or against any member of the royal family because I don’t know them personally, but I am just plain embarrassed at the idea of an apparently adult democracy being ‘ruled’ over by an accident of genetics.  My feelings of indifference extend to all those posh girls and boys who marry into the royal family, so I shouldn’t give a toss about the latest Kate Middleton hooha.  But really!  Any pregnant woman is entitled to have her feelings, her nausea and her medical details kept confidential, so the broadcast hoax call was grubby in the extreme.  But so is the sight of wrinkly male royal correspondents standing outside palaces or hospitals solemnly informing the world of the latest non-news on the woman’s condition.  If you like an hereditary monarchy, the confirmed conception of a new sprog was news, but now drop it, give the pregnant woman her privacy, and wait for the next piece of news, which will be the birth.  Shoo.  Out of the room now.

Meanwhile, the Australian DJs and their station are claiming that “The tragic outcome could not have been predicted.”  Why not?  What exactly did they expect would happen if they made a public fool of a nurse and tricked her into breaking the strict professional rules of confidentiality? I could predict that she might lose her job or choose to quit. That she might have her professional reputation ruined. That she might feel mortified, be in tears, make herself ill, even attempt suicide.  All these were possible, if not inevitable, consequences of the prank.  The ability to predict the possible consequences of our actions is one of the things, like opposable thumbs, that differentiate us from animals. Do Australian DJs have opposable thumbs?

Driven crazy

I’m fine with urban driving.  I can manage the three roundabouts in Cardigan without a second thought, and don’t hesitate with the Tesco’s interchange.  Even the blind turn by the Newport post office doesn’t worry me.  However.  London is quite a lot different to West Wales.  For a start there’s a whole lot more of it, and a whole lot more traffic.  Like, a million times more traffic, ten more lanes in every road, and none of them marked because, of course, all the drivers know exactly where they’re going, ad everyone in London precisely where Chiswick is, in relation to Hammersmith or Richmond.  Except me.  They point this out to me by hooting loudly at every occasion.  They don’t seem to think that stopping in the middle of a one-way system, putting the light on and consulting an atlas is reasonable behaviour.  I don’t understand them at all.

Neither do I understand the people in charge of road signs on the M4.  Okay, driving west from Reading, there’s a single sign, warning of deer for 43 miles.  43.  Not 45.  Not 40 or so, but 43. But coming the other way, from the west, there’s a sign warning of deer for the next 27 miles.  Then, a few miles further on, another sign warning of deer for 10 miles, then, eventually, another warning of deer for the next 12 miles.  Is this because the highways department only had one sheet of extra large Letraset and they used up the only 4 and 3 on the westbound carriageway, so they had to improvise on the east-bound?  And more importantly, how do the deer know when they have reached the limit of the stretch where they are allowed to run out in front of fast-moving traffic.  What happens to a deer who ventures beyond the 43 mile limit?  I think they just had some spare extra large Letraset deer symbols and wanted to use them up.  And they didn’t have any badger symbols.

votezzzzz

According to the BBC, voters are heading for the polls to elect police commissioners today.  They don't mention how many voters are doing the heading. 2 or 2 million? I haven't noticed much enthusiasm, or much interest.  In fact I haven't noticed anyone noticing that there are elections. I did make an effort a couple of weeks ago to discover, on-line, who my candidates might be, and I found there are two, one Labour and one Conservative.  The Labour candidate promises to make the police concentrate on anti-social behaviour.  The Conservative candidate suggests that the police should concentrate on anti-social behaviour.  I don't know, it's difficult.  How do I weigh up the opposing priorities? How shall I choose? I could use the opportunity to express my opinion of the Conservative party.  Or I could stay home and do something constructive.  Yes I know we fought for centuries for the right to vote, civil duty, social responsibility bla bla bla, but today I feel like being a bit of a rebel. Like nearly everyone else in the country.